amalnahurriyeh | META: Redheads Who Could Kill Me: Obvious Kink is Obvious

From LBB

Redheads Who Could Kill Me: Obvious Kink is Obvious
Author: Amal Nahurriyeh,

amalnahurriyeh, amalnahurriyeh at gmail dot com.
Fandoms: The X-Files; Battlestar Galactica (reboot); Buffy the Vampire Slayer; The West Wing; Doctor Who (new)
Spoilers: Through the entirety of existing canon for all shows (does not include Buffy Season 8 comics)

Written for

ladiesbigbang 2010. Thanks to the mods for this exciting challenge! My other meta contribution, On Being a Writer of Woman-Centric Fic, is here.

This meta has a compliment fanmix, made by

tree; it can be downloaded at her journal

borrowedfable here. Many, many thanks to

tree for it; it's totally amazing.

Screencaps are from the following sites:
X-Files: X-Files Archive
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who: Caps by Emma-Jane
The West Wing: Oxoniensis Caps
Battlestar Galactica: Frak That

Thanks very much to the dedicated cappers, who make it possible for people like me to be lazy.

All the caps I used, plus many more that didn't make it in (THESE LADIES ARE SO LOVELY I MUST HAVE PICTURES OF THEM) are here on my Picasa.

***

You know, I like to think that I'm a fairly complicated person. I study philosophy for a living. I'm always encouraging my students to make more nuanced arguments. I like the media I like because they are complex, and meaningful, and have lots of room for structural poking and prodding, and allow me to make in their medium. I am srs bzns fan, watch me overintellectualize.

Or so I say. It's not like that's a lie, per se. But. Do you want to know, really, why I get invested in the media I do? I'll let you in on a secret. It's a two-part evaluation:

Is there a female character on this show who could kill me?
Does she have red hair?

If the answers to 1 and 2 are yes, I AM SO FUCKING THERE.

From LBB

Of course, there are other fictional characters I'm attached to; most of them could kill me, but not all. (Some of them are even dudes.) Clearly my fictive kinks aren't entirely ironclad. But, well, I don't think it's a fluke, do you?

So, What's Up with the Redheads (Who Could Kill You)?

The connotations we are supposed to have, at least in North America, when we see a redheaded woman seem to rest around the concept of fiestiness. Redheads have attitude, spunk, a particular type of girlish uppityness. They talk back to authority, they argue, they're in your face and brash, just a little bit. In the end, sweet and well-meaning, most likely, but not without a bite.

The problem is that none of the women in this essay are anything like that. What they are is tough, strong, powerful. Sometimes they are silent, sometimes loud. Rarely flustered. And, yes, they do talk back to authority, but not with spunk, not because they're fiesty, but because they have power, authority, strength. That's what draws me to them initially: the intense strength they hold within themselves, and exercise with both care and determination. These are women who are impressive, both in their accomplishments (major politicians! officers of the law! savers of the world!) and in that they make an impression on you when you encounter them. No one could ever forget these women. They take up space. The hair, here, becomes a visual representation of this strength and power. You can see a redhead from across the room; she never fails to be visible. Even if they are more serious, in many cases, than this notion of the fiesty redhead, they carry that set of associations with them intimately.

But their strength is intimately intertwined with violence. Of the five women in this meta, four directly wield deadly force, and the fifth eventually helps to manage the largest military in human history. Each has some ambivalence towards this power, but reassures herself that she deploys it in the interest of what is right or good. If they kill you, it's because you deserve it, at least a little. Here would be an interesting place to point out that I am, myself, a Quaker and a religious pacifist. Nevertheless, I am deeply compelled by characters (both male and female) who do things that I find patently immoral, such as killing people, but have an intricate and well-reinforced moral code for doing it: those who demand good reasons for killing, but are perfectly willing to do the killing if they are convinced. All of these characters fall into this category. None of them kill for fun, or because they're told to do so. They exercise the violence they control only when they feel they have a pressing reason to do so.

From LBB

Dana Scully

Lots of significant things happened between the Pilot of The X-Files and the second episode, Deep Throat. (Including a year and a half, by internal dates.) But for my purposes, the biggest is this:

From LBB

Why did Dana Scully's hair turn from brown to red? Certainly the Doylist answers are the most obvious. It's Phile lore that Gillian Anderson died her blond hair brown for her audition, in an attempt to look older and more serious. (She was all of 25, and babyfaced--she needed the help.) Her new hair color and cut make some sense, as an attempt to brighten her face and, again, age her (say it again: 25).

But let's be Watsonians. Why would Scully want red hair? It makes sense as an attempt to distinguish herself, to stand out, to move from blending in to being someone you notice. Dana Scully, little girl in a big loud family; Dr. Scully, in the back behind a big metal table and a scary-looking corpse; Agent Scully, having to walk twice as fast as her partner to make sure she doesn't get left behind. You'd do something under those conditions to make yourself seen; you'd take steps to keep your place held. Hair dye's as good a choice as any.

(This is the point where one might point out a careless bit of maybe-continuity: that her partner mentions at one point that he's red-green colorblind. Now, this is vauguely implausible, given that it's unlikely Mulder would have passed Bureau vision tests if he were actually colorblind, and also that it's never mentioned again, just like his phobia of fire. Oh, continuity, you were never this show's strong point. But there is a question about whether Mulder would have noticed this gesture--or whether he was its intended target at all. But this is not the "Amal projects her feelings onto Mulder" Big Bang--that would be the rest of my fannish output--so I'll leave it alone.)

From LBB

Regardless of what spawned Scully's hair, it becomes her defining feature throughout the show's arc. Her hair just gets redder and redder as time passes, glowing more and more as her clothing retreats further into neutrals, becoming the pop of color that defines her from a distance. Scully's hair is her defining point, not just visually on the show (think of Milagro, an episode entirely dedicated to Scully's beauty--how much of it is about the trace of her hair through a room?), but also in fanon: the strawberry shampoo and 'titian tresses' of countless fics, Mulder's contemplation of it, the vision of little redheaded babies denied.

From LBB

As her hair gets brighter, and her aestheic more severe, she becomes more and more able to fight. We barely believe the girl who stands at Ellens Air Force Base with an abducted MIB in her car, demanding the return of her partner at gunpoint. And her shooting of Puppet (a serial killer) in Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose seems more like a fluke than anything: a lucky shot, a random chance occurrance. It's not until she's faced with Luis Cardinale, her sister's murderer, that we are truly willing to believe she has deadly force in her hands. And past that, her power over death seems to be her greatest source of strength: a dying Dana Scully is the most intense and focused we ever see. Even as her body betrays her, she grows stronger and fiercer, more and more able to take on the powers that be. Coming out on the other side of each of her (major) near-deaths--cancer, Antarctica, you know, that sort of thing--she emerges refined and ready to fight with whoever needs fighting with. This power is most purely concentrated in the death of Donnie Pfaster, an escaped death fetishist who comes after her as the one who got away, and who she kills. By this point, near the end of the show's central arc, Dana Scully is an avenging angel, someone whose potential violence has been tightly coiled and prepared.

From LBB

To say that things shift in the last two seasons is such a Philish commonplace that I feel stupid saying it. The grieving, pregnant, lonely woman who emerges out of this period of canon is in many ways an echo of herself, redirected and looking back at us from somewhere else entirely. But I would like to point out that her hair changes with her. It gets longer, and darker; no longer penny-bright, the new, more weary, embattled, maternal Dana Scully returns to shades of her Pilot self, only considerably altered. We still see all those shades of her past eight years, but darkly, in highlights and bright moments. And the world of The X-Files has never been rich with those.

From LBB

It seems necessary to talk about Scully's hair in I Want To Believe, which came six years after the series finale. Frankly, Scully's hair is the least of the absurd premises that IWTB asks us to believe, but let's take it seriously for a moment. Frankly, I don't think there's a good Watsonian reason for the color: the length, perhaps, but I can't see any plausible reason for Dana Scully to want to be a blonde. (Which she is. Don't front.) For a woman who consciously chose red hair, hair which is meant to signify danger and fierceness and spunk, what motive could there be for choosing hair that means vapidity and sexual objectification? Perhaps while on the run, as one of the many shifting disguises of a woman in hiding, but Dr. Scully, Magical Neurosurgeon, doesn't need the cover. Maybe avoid red; maybe go back to her natural color, which canon suggests is brunette. But a blond? Not likely. (I am 95% certain our answer lies in the gestational age of Gillian Anderson's younger son at the time of filming and/or the fact that she'd just come off a movie where her hair was totally fried, and it needed a break. I respect these reasons. Nevertheless, they do not constitute good reasons in-story.)

Scully's hair, paled to this gentle strawberry blond color, in many ways reflects the changes in her character: she appears to be a faded reflection of her old self, grasping at the edges. This is the Scully who, at the end of Fight the Future, said, "You know what, Mulder? You're right. I'm going to go be a doctor. Fuck off, and look me up at the apocalypse." This is the woman who would have told Mulder, "Give up the quest. Stay here and raise our son. Stop fighting." But what made Scully herself is that she didn't say either of those things. What could have broken her enough while on the run to bring her to this? I don't know, though I've built a fic empire on the topic. The movie simply doesn't give us the depth to tell. (I feel compelled to mention at this point that I LIKED THE MOVIE. THIS IS WHAT SOMEONE WHO LIKED IT SOUNDS LIKE, mmkay?).

In any case, among my favorite scenes in Machines of Freedom is the moment when Scully dyes her hair red again (and then struggles about whether or not to cut it off). Scully needs her armor for battle, and canon makes it clear her armor starts at the crown of her head. Scully's hair is a part of how she makes herself our heroine. And making herself look like herself again is one of the great challenges of writing in a post-IWTB universe.

From LBB

Laura Roslin

It's hard to pick who's the most badass in this meta; after all, each of these women have very different strengths and inhabit incompatible universes. But, you know what? I feel confident saying this: Laura Roslin would airlock a baby, motherfuckers. It's pretty hard to top that.

(And to everyone who wants to respond with a link to Iolokus/Good Night, Newton/etc: not actually canon.)

From LBB

Laura Roslin starts the series with some hair issues. I mean, that haircut in the mini, it's not a good thing. At all.

From LBB

Nevertheless, she survives this fashion catastrophe, and ends up with, I swear to the gods, the best hair anyone has ever had during an apocalypse. Let's be clear here: there are water shortages, food shortages, a toothpaste shortage by the end of it. But Laura Roslin, with all four of her suits, looks like a million bucks. There's a certain tenacity to that; you simply have to appreciate it.

From LBB

Roslin is also the least timid about her use of deadly power. She is in charge of protecting the remnant of humanity, and she takes her task seriously. She's willing to kill for it--Cylons, mostly, but humans also where necessary. She's willing to steal. She's willing to break hearts. Laura Roslin is unafraid to use her deadly strength, and uses it easily for most of the series. During the New Caprican colonization, while she is out of political power, she remains tied to projects to lead the population; she's a formidable part of the resistance, and remains central to politics even when she isn't actually in government.

From LBB

She only begins to regret it when she is confronted, not with killing from behind the veil of the state, but with her own two hands. Gaius Baltar might deserve to die, but she can't carry out that sentence herself, not in the person of Laura Roslin, rather than president of the Twelve Colonies. The killer in Roslin comes from the role she takes, not from her own desires, and she is able, finally, to put it aside, to realize that she can remain a total fucking badass and yet seek nonviolent continuations of struggle--from war to politics, as Clauswitz would say.

But death is a part of Roslin in another way; she was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly before the attack on the colonies, fights the disease through the entire series, and dies of it in the last episode. Perhaps part of why it is so easy for her to exercise the state's power over death is because death is something she carries with her. It's not just the echoes of the billions of deaths on the planets behind them, but its inimate sneakings around her body that drive her forward.

From LBB

Hair matters to cancer patients (I say, looking back on myself at sixteen in a hospital bed). Perhaps this is why Roslin's hair has to be so perfect: she is fighting against a disease that is marked, in Colonial culture as in ours, by the loss of hair. And her sudden shift of hair in 4.0 and 4.5--the admission that "This is a wig," her willingness to appear in public with her bald head only covered by a scarf--is the beginning of her admission that death has won, that it cannot be conquered even in her own body. The remnant of humanity will die; it cannot perpetuate itself, except only in echoes, merged with others, constantly in flux.

From LBB

Willow Rosenberg

Oh, Willow. You start off so innocent and innocuous, and end up being the biggest badass on the show, and a canon queer to boot. That's my girl.

From LBB

Interestingly, we have here something of the opposite problem that Gillian Anderson had: Alyson Hannigan is much older than she was playing on BtVS, though she doesn't look anywhere near as old as she is. But throughout the early seasons, her long, straight, deeply red hair is closely tied to her girlish costuming. Willow is very young, trying to find her way from being the high school dork to being someone who might, maybe, make it a notch or two up the hierarchy.

From LBB

Her lopping off of her long hair is exactly what it seems like: an attempt to look like a grownup. When she does so, she's in the middle of trying out attempts at adulthood: dating seriously, preparing for college, getting ready to move on to new and (hopefully) more exciting things. (This is such an eminently relatable style choice: who hasn't tried a new hairstyle, a new color, a new aesthetic, to try to break out of an old mold and into a new one?) While her fashion sense stays...interesting, Willow's new, cute, swingy 'do reflects the transition she's trying to make. It also embodies her attitude: though she's still socially awkward, she's more confident and self-assured, more willing to put herself forward. If anything, Willow's the best example of the "spunky redhead" in this meta: she's friendly, quirky, and interesting, but fundamentally accessible and not intimidating...on the surface.

From LBB

As Willow starts growing up, we start to realize that she isn't just smart, as we'd thought; her powers run deeper. So Willow's transition from long pigtails to the short bob also reflects the transition from hacker-Willow to witch-Willow, from being a brilliant girl to being, well, a superhero. She's as high-powered as Buffy is, I'd argue (lucky Sunnydale, I think).

From LBB

There's no real shift in Willow's style when she starts dating Tara, or when, shortly thereafter, she begins identifying as queer. I'm conflicted about whether or not I like this. On the one hand, as someone who has never 'looked like a lesbian,' despite having been one for at least 15 years, I appreciated that there was a queer girl on the TV who, well, looked like me. (My hair is substantially less awesome, though.) On the other hand, though, the sartorial transformation associated with the coming out process is a mainstay of these stories for a reason: nearly everone does it. Even if I didn't hack my hair off until I was twenty-mumble-snarf, I still spent a lot of time trying to look like I belonged to a queer community, which meant drssing and styling myself certain ways, and wearing visible signs of queerness. (Those of you who are/have hung out with teenage queers know this: the dreaded rainbow-pin phase.) But neither Willow nor Tara do this. In fact, they never are seen trying to join a queer community (unless we are to take the Wicca club as a lesbian coven, which...is both wrong and right in many ways). I'd go so far as to say that this is a problem with folks who aren't deeply embedded in queer communities writing queer folks, or the generalized problem of writing the other--even when your characters make sense as fully realized individuals, they sometimes lack something in versimilitude. Or, tl;dr needs moar buzzcuts and rainbow flags.

There are two moments when Willow's hair is used as a signal, to tell us something about her inner state. The first is when she transforms into dark!Willow, following Tara's senseless murder. Her hair turns black; also she gets scary vampire eyes and goes all veiny, but let's stick to the hair. At this moment, all of the evil magical energy Willow is harnessing needs an outlet. It transforms her body as surely as it transforms her actions, and her hair is the most remarkable of its transformations. When Xander is talking her down at the hillside, convincing her not to destroy the world in her grief, we know it's working as her hair, slowly, fades back to red.

From LBB

From this point on, Willow is terrified of her powers. She's seen the corruption they can lead to. She spends a while studying with a powerful coven, hoping they can help her remain in control. When she is called back to Sunnydale to help fight the first, she limits herself to her mundane powers: hacking, research, languages. But, finally, her magic is necessary, not just to win the fight, but to reorganize the entire mystical-social institution of Slayerdom. (I'm a big fan of season seven, if you didn't catch that.) Willow is justifiably nervous as she embarks on this endeavor; previous attempts to use her powers have not been successful. She sits with the axe, Kennedy, her new girlfriend, sitting across from her, and says, if I turn evil, you have to kill me. And Kennedy consents; she's the most prepared of the potentials, the most sure of her own deadly power. Yet, when Willow begins her magic, this is what we get:

From LBB

You're a goddess, Kennedy whispers, and we agree. Rather than dark!Willow, here is light!Willow, consumed with her own power to transform the rules of the game. Kennedy takes the changed rules, and runs off to go save the world.

And Willow? Is still Willow. While I haven't read all of season eight, what I have read suggests that Willow remains on this path of heightened power. Even in the very changed post-Chosenworld, her roots are too deep in the good magic to go dark again. Her hair, at last, is safe.

From LBB

Claudia Jean Craigg

We get a rare treat in canon for C.J. Craigg: an image of her pre-series hair. We know what she looked like before she was press secretary. And the answer is this:

From LBB

I am fascinated by this, because it opens up so many possibilities. CJ's hair is apparently naturally curly. Does this imply that she's straightening it every morning before work? Before the White House, she used to wear it in a style that could only be called cute and girlish. Is the moment at which she left LA for the Bartlett campaign the moment she got serious?

From LBB

Because CJ's hair is nothing but serious. She's easily the most composed looking of the senior staff, probably because she has to deal with the public. Josh and Toby can afford to look schlubby; CJ can't. Her serious styling stands in contrast to the amount of humor that CJperforms: she's hilarious, both in the sense of doing intentionally funny things, and of being the center point for funny arcs. Because she's the public face of the administration, she ends up dealing with some silly things, including, in one of my favorite bits, turkeys. And a cow. But CJ handles it all with grace and aplomb. Because she's just that awesome.

From LBB

CJ's major transition during the series is her sudden promotion to Chief of Staff. I tend to think this was a crap writing decision, designed to create fakey-fake tension among the characters. I tend to feel this way about the post-Sorkin seasons, because my ass is cranky and I like my series cocaine-fueled-auteur-driven. But I don't actually hate the decision; I think CJ is amazing as Chief of Staff, better than any of the other senior staffers would have been. It makes neither Earth sense nor narrative sense, but it works, and I end up accepting it in those terms.

From LBB

The first thing that changes about her is her hair: it gets longer and darker very, very quickly. I talked in the first section about the associaton between girlishness and red hair; when CJ needs to be taken seriously, really seriously, she stops being a redhead.

I get the reasoning. I really do. But I don't think the dark hair works on her. In fact, I really think CJ doesn't look good as Chief of Staff. She's artificially aged, by both the length and the color; it doesn't suit her. This is frustrating, because it reinforces that association between redheadedness and non-seriousness. As the women in this meta show, red hair doesn't make you unserious; it can do exactly the opposite. But CJ's late-season styling sticks with the status quo. She's not less awesome because of it...but her hair is.

From LBB

Donna Noble

Without a doubt, Donna is my favorite companion. (Caveat: I don't know Old Who. But I don't think that would change matters.) There are two things I love about Donna: that she is so balls to the wall intense about every damn thing she does, and that she is absolutely not in love with the Doctor.

Part of the narrative problem of Donna is that, as the Bride, she starts out as a joke. She bludgeons her fiancé into being interested in her--and is then humiliated, and told she's stupid and worthless, when she tries to marry him. Her behavior, throughout the series, is played for laughs; Donna is every inch the big, brash, brassy ginger stereotype, and she plays it to the hilt.

From LBB

This works; we believe that Donna is funny, and it doesn't diminish her in our eyes. Part of the reason this works is that Catherine Tate is a funny, funny woman, and she makes it work. But the other reason it works is that Donna is more than just a brash ginger. She's deeply moral, even when she doesn't know what the right thing to do is. She's devoted to her family, and to those she acquires as family, like the Doctor. She's unsure of herself, and simultaneously incredibly sure of herself, which is a combination I recognize in the mirror. And she is brave, when it's required, so brave.

From LBB

Donna's hair doesn't undergo any great transformation over the course of her run on the show. (It is only 13 episodes, after all.) But it marks her, makes clear who she is whenever she's on camera. Donna is Donna, and she's the only person with a personality to match the Doctor's.

From LBB

I hate Journey's End. Yes, it's a good episode, but I hate, with the fiery passion of a thousand suns or a Dalek invasion, Donna's ending. She says, just a few episodes before, that she just wants to travel with the Doctor forever; she wants to explore and understand the unlimited universe, to take in everything she can. And for just a moment in Journey's End, she gets it: she becomes a Time Lord, and she can hold that expansive infinity in her head. She can travel forever; she can keep going, and going, and going.

From LBB

And she can't. I really don't care what the in-story reasons are for Donna needing to be mindwiped; they don't matter, and they could have been changed. The decision to rob Donna not only of her Time-Lordly powers, but also of all memory of her travels with the Doctor, was unnecessary and cruel. Here was the first companion in New Who whose attachment to the Doctor was merely friendly, who only wanted to roam the universe and enjoy his company (and, occasionally, tell him to slag off); the first one whose interest was in the universe first. And she is the one who loses everything. Rose gets her family back, and even a psuedo-Doctor, in the end. Martha gets to go back to her family, to get married, to be happy in an ordinary (alien-battling) life. But Donna? Donna gets erased. She doesn't know why she didn't get married; she doesn't know what happened in all those months she traveled; she is left to a life of looking off into the distance, knowing there's something more, but unable to see it, to guess at it, to even glance past it.

The End Of Time only amplified this frustration for me. Donna's family is central to the plot; Donna herself, however, can only be marginalized. Certainly, the Doctor's love and guilt are apparent in his actions--but fuck that noise, she should get to be fighting with him, not passed out on her goddamn couch. Every other companion gets a friendly visit; Donna gets a lottery ticket.

Which brings me around to the redhead who couldn't kill me: Amy Pond.

From LBB

I'd like to propose that the resolution to Amy Pond's storyarc in The Big Bang is, in fact, a rewriting of Donna's arc, a story that salvages the redhead who was lost before. Amy, like Donna, was left behind by the Doctor, and sought him (though poor wee Amelia had much less autonomy to hunt). She shows up in the TARDIS as a passenger, finally, right before her wedding; she's the new Bride in the TARDIS, and she travels through time aware of this status. And, in the Big Bang, Amy forgets the Doctor; her entire history with him is erased, non-existant, never-happened.

From LBB

But Amy gets everything Donna was denied. This bride gets married. This bride remembers: "YOU ARE LATE FOR MY WEDDING," she yells, and with this scream she can summon the Doctor back from non-existence. And after her wedding, she and her groom go and get back in the TARDIS. Amy's going to get to travel in the TARDIS for ever and ever (or until Moffat writes her out, at least). Amy wins everything Donna lost. And it's not such a bad deal, after all.

In Conclusion

I love these women.

I love them for being a subversion of the idea of "the redhead." I love them for being something more than just the "strong woman," the "fierce badass," but for being intricate and complex characters who are undeniably both strong and powerful without becoming caracatures. I love the idea of them sitting together in some great fictional hair salon--Donna and Amy swapping TARDIS stories under the dryers, CJ and Roslin running out of the room every ten minutes, curlers still in, to take phone calls, Scully silently judging everyone else in the room from behind her copy of Cosmo. I love that there are characters out there who helped me create this kink, obviously enough; I love that it keeps getting fed.

I love their hair.

Have I mentioned that?

Tags:

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Date: 2010-09-21 07:46 pm (UTC)

From:

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags